The merchant of Tirmiz takes the wise parrot and myna to ‘Ubaid, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The merchant of Tirmiz takes the wise parrot and myna to ‘Ubaid, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The merchant of Tirmiz hurries home with a parrot’s cage clutched in his right hand and a myna bird’s in his left. His friend, dressed in orange, has suggested that these wise birds can offer advice to the merchant’s son, ‘Ubaid, who has becomes excessively infatuated with his wife.

Object facts

• Title: The merchant of Tirmiz takes the wise parrot and myna to ‘Ubaid, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night
• Date: c. 1560
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 20.3 x 14 cm (8 x 5 1/2 in.); Painting only: 12 x 10.2 cm (4 3/4 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.269.b

A detail from the museum

Tirmiz, a city in modern-day Uzbekistan, is situated along the Amu-Darya river in Central Asia.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chandra, Pramod, and Daniel J. Ehnbom. The Cleveland Tuti-Nama Manuscript and the Origins of Mughal Painting. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.
• Nakhshabī, Z̤iyāʼ al-Dīn, and Muhammed Ahmed Simsar. Tales of a Parrot = The Cleveland Museum of Art's Ṭūṭīnāma. Cleveland: The Museum, 1978.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.